DevOps Automation using Google Deployment Manager

What is Infrastructure as code?

• Infrastructure as code is a concept that is important in this DevOps world, it describes the infrastructure that is required by your application as code. That’s the reason, most of the Cloud Providers have their own “Infrastructure Automation” tools like AWS as ‘Amazon Cloud Formation’, Azure as ‘Azure Resource Manager’ and Google Cloud as ‘Deployment Manager’. All these tools provide us a way to define our resources in a declarative manner and put them together in a single unit what we call a Configuration File.
• The traditional method of managing the IT Infrastructure was difficult since it was manual processing. For configuring the machines and for performing the various task, professionals were hired from network Engineers to hardware maintainers with no automation involved. This leads to scalability and availability problems, an increase in cost, and also maintaining uptime.
• To overcome these hurdles, there came Infrastructure as code, in simple words IaC manages our IT Infrastructure by creating various Configuration files. Before IaC? IT personnel had to manually change the configuration to manage their Infrastructure.

Benefits of IaC:

• Speed – IaC allows us to set up complete infrastructure by just running scripts, we can do it for any environment from development to production, QA, and more.
• Consistency – Manual process results in mistakes, IaC solves this issue by allowing us to write configuration files that can be deployed again and again without any discrepancy.?
• Increased Efficiency – By applying Iac you can deploy your Infrastructure architecture in many stages, which makes the whole software development cycle efficient raising the team productivity.
• Lower Cost – One of the main benefits of IaC is lowering the cost of infrastructure management, by employing cloud computing with IaC you dramatically reduce your cost i.e because you won't have to spend money on hardware, or on hier people to operate it or build, rent physical spaces to store it.

Let's have a look at how Google Cloud Deployment Manager allows us to automate the task by the use of a configuration file that includes GCP Resources.

Pre-requisites required for GCP: -?

1. GCP Account
2. GCP Project with billing enabled
3. Enable the Deployment Manager and Compute Engine APIs.?
4. Google cloud SDK Installed which will include a “ cloud” command-line tool.

Note: Before starting any coding set up your project -id, run the below-mentioned command within Cloud Shell.

1. gcloud auth login
2. gcloud config set project [MYPROJECT_ID]

How to Define your Resources:

Create a YAML syntax, which describes your resources in a configuration file.

# Code credit: - cloud.google.com documents (code reference)
#Link: https://cloud.google.com/deployment-manager/docs/manage-cloud-resources-deployment

resources:
- type: compute.v1.instance
? name: quickstart-deployment
? properties:

? ? zone: us-central1-f
? ? # Replace [MY_PROJECT] with your project ID

? ? machineType: https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/[MY_PROJECT]/zones/us-central1-f/machineTypes/f1-micro
? ? disks:
? ? - deviceName: boot
? ? ? type: PERSISTENT
? ? ? boot: true
? ? ? autoDelete: true
? ? ? initializeParams:

? ? ? ? 
? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? sourceImage: https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/debian-cloud/global/images/family/debian-9

? ? # Replace [MY_PROJECT] with your project ID
? ? networkInterfaces:
? ? - network: https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/[MY_PROJECT]/global/networks/default
? ? ?
? ? ? accessConfigs:
? ? ? - name: External NAT
      - type: ONE_TO_ONE_NAT        

?This basic configuration describes the properties of virtual machines like machine type, zone, and image family, also need to replace [MYPROJECT_ID] with your Project ID.

Deploy the resources:

• Run the below-mentioned command in the gcloud-command-line tool.

gcloud deployment-manager deployments create quickstart-deployment --config vm.yaml

• Once the deployment is successful, it will display a message as :

Create operation operation-1432319707382-5b7103978 completed successfully.

NAME? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? TYPE? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? STATE? ? ? ERRORS

quickstart-deployment ? compute.v1.instance COMPLETED? -

• We can also describe our deployment by running below mentioned command.

gcloud deployment-manager deployments describe quickstart-deployment

• To delete your deployment run below mentioned command.

gcloud deployment-manager deployments delete quickstart-deployment

• In this way Deployment Manager in GCP plays an important role in the DevOps world by removing the old traditional ways. We can also use CI tools like Jenkins for automation with GCP. For customers who are using the cloud in bigger ways, it becomes easy for them to simplify cloud management. Deployment manager as an infrastructure service automates the creation and management of google cloud platform resources, allows us to create a configuration file that defines resources and processes that can be repeated over and over again with consistent results. . GDM allows you to easily deploy systems in a variety of locations, it also helps us to deploy several version of your code simultaneously, also allows you to change the deployment by adding or removing resources and updating the properties of existing resources.